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  susam
  Also, don't forget to set up an RSS or Atom feed for your website. Contrary to the recurring claim that RSS is dead, most of the traffic to my website still comes from RSS feeds, even in 2̶0̶2̶5̶ 2026! In fact, one of my silly little games became moderately popular because someone found it in my RSS feed and shared it on HN. [1]From the referer (sic) data in my web server logs (which is not completely reliable but still offers some insight), the three largest sources of traffic to my website are:1. RSS feeds - People using RSS aggregator services as well as local RSS reader tools.2. Newsletters - I was surprised to discover just how many tech newsletters there are on the Web and how active their user bases are. Once in a while, a newsletter picks up one of my silly or quirky posts, which then brings a large number of visits from its followers.3. Search engines - Traffic from Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing and similar search engines. This is usually for specific tools, games and HOWTO posts available on my website that some visitors tend to return to repeatedly.[1] https://susam.net/from-web-feed-to-186850-hits.html
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  Zaskoda
  We followed this practice at a Non-Profit I volunteered for some years ago. For us, it was motivated by a few reasons:- we trained the community around us to look to our website first for the most recent news and information- we did not want a social media platform to be able to cut us off from our community (on purpose or accident) by shuttering accounts or groups- we did not want to require our users have accounts on any 3rd party platforms in order to access our postings- but we still wanted to distribute our messaging across any platforms where large groups of our community members frequently engagedAnother aspect of our process that was specific to our situation and outside of POSSE - we only posted one topic/issue/announcement per blog post. We had a news letter that would summarize each of these. Many organizations like ours would post summaries of many things to a single blog post, basically the same as the newsletter. However, this was cumbersome. For example, if someone in the community had a question, it was much clearer to link to a single post on our site that answered the question AND ONLY answered that question. It made for much better community engagement, better search engine indexing, cleaner content management, and just a better experience for everyone involved.
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  hoherd
  One of the biggest steps down in Facebook history was their removal of RSS syndication. There was a time in the past when you could subscribe your Facebook account to external RSS feeds. The entries in those feeds would create new content on your "Facebook wall". This essentially let you use any third party that supported RSS to publish content into your Facebook feed.Facebook removed that feature. The effect of this was that people had to create content within facebook instead of outside it. This reoriented the flow of content creation so that it must originate inside of Facebook, removing the ability to use FB as a passive consumer of content created in a workflow where the creators chose the entire flow.IMHO this is one of the biggest steps down ever in FB history. It was one of the biggest attacks on the open web, and I'm sad to say that it mostly worked, and the internet at large is worse as a result.
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  foxfired
  I've restarted blogging last year, going from a handful of blog post to, publishing consistently. All content gets published on my blog first. I've seen an ~8x increase of traffic. I was affected by zero-clicks from Google's AI overview, but the bulk of my traffic now comes from RSS readers.I published a write up just this morning: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-its-like-blogging-in-2025
• bjhess
  EchoFeed is a lovely service to enable this regardless of what service you use to publish on your own site (so long as it supports RSS/Atom/JSON). I've used it to good effect for my blog in the past.https://echofeed.app/
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  doodlesdev
  This strategy is an alternative to PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site) [0]. I really like this read on the indieweb website, it explains well why adopt this strategy for federation and emphasizes that "Friends are more important than federation", something a lot of nerds and hackers forget when defending their ideals.[0]: https://indieweb.org/PESOS
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  simonw
  I really like this philosophy. I've been using it for a couple of years now - everything goes on my personal site, then I post links on Mastodon, Bluesky and Twitter and sometimes (if I remember to do so) LinkedIn, plus copy and paste it all into a Substack email every week or so.I really need to automate it though - hard on Twitter and LinkedIn but still pretty easy for Bluesky and Mastodon.
• anon
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  crashabr
  The concept seems trivial and widely used by many existing bloggers (and the default for most media outlets) so I feel like I'm missing something.
• cosmicgadget
  I don't do any syndication so my self-published site is simply a POS :'(Somewhat related, predictions for the future of the web by IWC contritbutors:https://vhbelvadi.com/indieweb-carnival-round-up-dec-2025
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  merelysounds
  > Syndication can be done fully automatically by the serverAt the risk of stating the obvious: this can get tricky, many popular social media platforms restrict automated posting. Policies around automation and/or api usage can change often and may not even be fully public as some might overlap anti spam measures.
• ozim
  Downside is “elsewhere” is going to cut your reach when you post a link because they want their users to stay in their estate.
• softwaredoug
  I am not so sure. You need to speak in the native voice of each community. A LinkedIn post vs Tweet vs E-Mail are different. You need to get value from the network directly without expecting a click thru. A lot of engagement + authority happens via the network itselfI think it's more accurate to see blogging as a distinct channel from other types of social media + content marketing
• acessoproibido
  I really want to implement this, but i havent been able to figure out how to do it for Instagram (the only social media that is really relevant in my friend circle) and whatsapp/signal groups other than doing it manually. If anyone has tips, especially for Insta let me know...
• nesk_
  Just discovered https://posseparty.com/ to ease your cross-posting.
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  nicbou
  This is my approach and I fully recommend it. My personal website is my canonical home address on the web. It has outlived a few platforms and many rounds of enshittification.A few caveats:- You will have different communities on each social network. Your personal website might be home to you, but to your users, it's not. You're just another creator on their platform of choice.- Each community has its own vibe, and commands slightly different messaging. This is partly due to the format each platform allows. Each post will create parallel but different conversations.- Dumping links is frowned upon. You should be a genuine participant in each community, even if you just repost the same stuff. Automation does not help much there.- RSS and newsletters are the only audiences that you control, and they're worth growing. Everywhere else, people who explicitly want to follow you might never see your updates.- You should own the domain you post to. This is your address on the internet, and it should stay yours- People do check your personal website. I was surprised to hear friends and acquaintances refer to things I post on my website.
• anon
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• aussieguy1234
  Medium API is mentionedBut this is no longer available.You have to copy and paste the article into Medium manually unfortunately.
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  jdthedisciple
  How do you fellow HN'ers separate their online with their corporate identity and day job?I cannot rid myself of the suspicion that your average boss is going to have a prying eye on your online activities and may even use them against you one way or another e.g. if you offer services/work on side projects that may in any way may compete w/ your employer.Anyone got experience to share in that regard?Thinking about this famous precedent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195#27425041
• anon
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• ronbenton
  I still feel RSS was the pinnacle. Of course it’s a personal preference, but I much prefer letting people pull my content than pushing it onto them.
• jamietanna
  I've been doing this for years with my site, and it's brought me a lot of joy that I can go back and search my site for various posts I've made over the last decade across all the platforms I use - I have a more high friction setup, but that's because of my own terrible choices
• ChrisArchitect
  Related:Ask HN: Is starting a personal blog still worth it in the age of AI?https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268055A website to destroy all websiteshttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46457784
• 01HNNWZ0MV43FF
  You can tell it's a good idea because Facebook and other "big enough to crush instead of cooperate" media sites down-rank you for doing it
• dieselgate
  It’s almost like HN is a great platform for the POSSE model!Awesome share thanks for the link. Will send to a family member who is looking to gain viewership with their writing - they usually post on medium I think.
• LightBug1
  Awesome initiative. Will delve into this. It's how the web should be.
• GaryBluto
  If only HN had been doing this almost since it's inception. Oh wait.
• xenophonf
  Someone recommended Posse Party in a now deleted comment, but beware its (ambiguous and poorly written, if you ask me) noncommercial license:https://github.com/searlsco/posse_party/blob/main/LICENSE.tx...
• anon
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• vikas-sharma
  [dead]
• theturtletalks
  POSSE can be applied to more than just social networks, it can be used to disrupt every marketplace!In fact, I’m building open source SaaS for every vertical and leveraging that to build an interoperable, decentralized marketplace.Social media is a marketplace as well. The good being sold is people’s content and the cost you pay is with your attention. The marketplace’s cut is ads and selling your data.
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  vegabook
  This post like many recent ones like it, essentially wants the internet to go backwards to what it once was pre-LLMs [edit: and pre-concentration]. I'd like to suggest that you should follow through and go all the way to pre-internet itself, and rediscover handwriting, in-person local meeting groups, non-digital relationships, and using your hands not on a keyboard. Today I (with difficulty) left my macbook closed all day until this evening (and this comment). Small steps.